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Thursday, 29 April 2010

To get dual-monitor remote desktop over VNC working withUbuntu, I had to install x11vnc. With the default VNC server, only half of my desktop would appear with the other half blacked out. Also, the whole two screen layout would not fit within my VNC client window.Ultimately this is the command I came up with the start the VNC server:

x11vnc -xinerama -xwarppointer -scale 3/4 -noxdamage -ncache 10

The first two arguments setup dual screen mode. The next one (-scale 3/4) scales the screen to 3/4 of it's original size (the scaling is done server-side). The -noxdamage argument prevented some annoying server errors that were appearing. And the -ncache 10 option enables client-side pixel caching, which speeds up things considerably.

Friday, 16 April 2010

It took a lot to get this setup. I made the mistake of installing PulseAudio, and had to uninstall it before my sound would work in the slightest. But even then, I had jerky sound. The solution was to make some edits to my /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf so that it appears as follows:

Wednesday, 14 April 2010

I recently bought a USB MIDI interface off ebay. It was just a generic, pretty cheap made-in-china kind of model, with a red, orange and green light. It lit up red when I plugged it into my (Linux) computer, but showed up in lsusb as "Unknown" device:

Turns out, even though it's listed as an unknown device, it still worked as a MIDI input. I just started up JACK Audio Server, Rosegarden, and ZynAddSubFx for an organ simulation. Then i plugged in the MIDI In and Out ports to my keyboard, hooked up the connections in JACK and it all worked!

Being USB of course, there was some delay, and for some peculiar reason no keys below Middle C would work for me. But it works well on Sibelius!

Wednesday, 7 April 2010

I'm looking at reinstalling my server (currently Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) with openSuSE 11.2. Does anyone know of some way that I can configure openSuSE as an Active Directory domain controller? I would like to configure Samba and LDAP with a GUI preferably, and automatically transfer any modifications I make to the client computers. I also need offline authentication.

I was looking at Novell eDirectory, and it appears to be exactly what I am looking for. Is there a tutorial available for how to setup eDirectory on openSuSE? By default it runs on Open Enterprise Server only.